Tag: Fermilab

Since 1983, the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab outside Chicago has been faithfully smashing particles and probing deeper into the mysteries of physics. But its time is nearly at an end.

The Large Hadron Collider—that big European underground ring you might have heard of—surpassed Tevatron in size and energy. The American collider’s operators had hoped to extend its life a few more years, especially with LHC still getting up to speed. But the money just wasn’t there, and so the announcement came yesterday that Tevatron would shut down in September.

In the fall, the Department of Energy’s High Energy Physics Advisory Panel recommended that the Tevatron be funded to run for three years beyond the planned end in September of 2011, largely in order to provide additional information in the search for the Higgs boson. … But in a letter to day to the chair of HEPAP, the head of the Office of Science at the Department of Energy, William Brinkman, wrote that “Unfortunately, the current budgetary climate is very challenging, and additional funding has not been identified. Therefore…operation of the Tevatron will end in FY2011, as originally scheduled.”

When neutrinos change from one phase to another, they tell us something about their mysterious nature. These ghostly subatomic particles come in three flavors, physicists say: muon, tau, and electron. Just this summer, a team caught a neutrino in the act of changing from muon to tau, a finding that backed up the argument that these particles do, in fact, have mass. This week, a new study of neutrino oscillation—the changing of flavors—suggests an deeper mystery, and implies that these three flavors of neutrino may not be enough to account for these particles’ behavior.

In Physical Review Letters, a large group of physicists published their study from the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab in Illinois. When the physicists looked at oscillations of muon antineutrinos into electron antineutrinos, they found the process happening faster than known physics predicts. Neutrinos followed the rules, but antineutrinos didn’t behave the same way did.

So what does it mean? We asked physicist Silvia Pascoli at the U.K.’s Durham University to explain:

Particle physicists hunting for the Higgs boson reported their latest findings yesterday at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris. The big two–Europe’s Large Hadron Collider and Fermilab’s Tevatron Collider (in Illinois)–gave updates, and other conference buzz included talk of a new facility, the International Linear Collider, which may one day give physicists a cleaner look at the other colliders’ results.

Large Hadron Collider — More Detailed Models Help the Search

Currently operating at 7 Tera electron Volts (TeV), the Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Though electrical malfunctions hindered the collider in 2008, now LHC scientists report that they have made up for lost time: finding in months, what took the Tevatron, with its 2 TeV collisions, decades.

“The scientific community thought it would take one, maybe two years to get to this level, but it happened in three months,” said Guy Wormser, a top French physicist and chairman of the conference.[AFP]